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Friday, 24 July 2015

Diary of Some Not-so-wimpy Project-based Learners

There has been a story brewing for some time that I am just now finding how to share. It happened when I was teaching grade 7 last year. I had challenged my students to "Address an Issue". I share a bit about the experience in The Problem with Project-based Learning. In "Addressing an Issue", the students were given the opportunity to choose an issue, either local or global, and decide on a way to address it.

After completing the challenge, I asked my students to reflect on how they felt about this kind of learning. I have been keeping their responses and wondering how I could work this into a post. I am now realizing that I don't need to work anything. All I needed to do was to let the students share their stories. What follows is what they came up with. This could be called a guest post of sorts as these are student reflections about their own work and their own experience. These are their own words and their own pictures: a view into the mind of a project-based learner.

Type 1 Diabetes

Our issue that we were working on is Type 1 Diabetes.
We are working on Type 1 diabetes because I have Type 1 diabetes. We made a PowerPoint to get people more aware about this terrible
disease and how many people are affected by it every year.

We both enjoyed this project as I got to teach my partner
about this disease and he got to learn a lot about what I have to go through
every day for the rest of my life

Orphans and Widows in Ethiopia

The
issue that we decided to address was the orphans and widows of Ethiopia. We
chose this issue because both orphans and widows cannot provide for themselves.
We partnered up with a local church to tackle this tough problem. To try and
help the orphans and widows we have had a couple of fundraisers. We hosted an
all ladies event at our church and we had a hot chocolate sale here at school.
We raised almost $4,000 dollars, and we still have donations coming in every
day. Also we have an anonymous donor who will double all the money we raise!
The money raised will go to help build an orphanage (we need to get supplies
and we will send missionaries there to build the orphanage).The money will also be given to the widows so
that they can start their own businesses and there by provide for their
families. This experience was amazing; it was a great insight into the lives of
orphans and widows. We were truly inspired by this project and hope to continue
to help the orphans and widows in Ethiopia.

We
really liked the problem-based learning. We think that it prepares us for real
life problems in a better way by challenging us to solve problems that we will
have to deal with when we are older. In our opinion it is a great way to learn
and we would recommend it to any school.

Our Niteo
Experience

Our issue that we decided to address
was something called the "Niteo" association project. Niteo is a
foundation that helps children in Uganda learn how to read for pleasure. We are
helping to solve this issue by coming up with a well thought out plan that was
pretty simple to follow. A short version of our plan was to raise some money at
a nearby church through a bake sale, then give half the money to Niteo,and half of the moneyfor buying prizes for a book drive that would
take place later on, then we would hold a book drive at our school. Once we had
the books and money, we would drop them off to the Niteo central office in
Kelowna.

We weren’t able to book an event at the
church, so instead after we told the pastor what the money would be for, he got
people to make some donations, and we got 45$ in total. We then went out and
bought prizes for the book drive and waited until the date came for the event.
Our plan was that every 10 books you donate you get one prize. After our book
drive, we got quite a few books, it was over 45 books, and we were very
satisfied! Now we must get the books to Kelowna, and our plan will be
completed!

What we think about the project based
learning is that we like it because instead of just doing one small assignment
and being over with it, it seems like we get to do a project for a while and
really get involved with it. We also like that with this project we got to take
some action towards what we wanted to help fix, and actually get the students
in the school and the people in our community involved. We also liked how not
every group had to their project on the exact same issue, and how we all got to
choose what we wanted to do.This entire
experience has been amazing for all four of us because we feel that this is
very important, we feel that we have helped one tiny bit of world’s problem’s,
and that makes us all feel very good! Now that this is almost all over, we are
happy to think that someday a child in Uganda will learn to read for pleasure
as we do! This has been truly an amazing experience!

The issue we are addressing is dog abuse. We chose this topic
because dog abuse is a very serious offence.People abuse dogs for no reason. There are many companies and
organizations that spend countless hours trying to stop dog abuse! We would like to help as well by spreading
the word through friends, family and our community.Our goal is that people will hear it
everywhere.Please call your local SPCA
or 911 if you see any dogs being hurt or mistreated by someone.It could be happening in your neighbourhood.If you see a neighbour hurting their dog,
please call 911 immediately! You could
save the dog’s life!

Why there should be hitting
in peewee hockey

We think there should be hitting in peewee
hockey because people are getting hurt from retaliation.For example slashing.Then to prevent that from happening you can properly hit
legally.

I like this
kind of learning because everything is a team thing and it's not all mine or
others work.

Building a new pool for our city

Our project was about our city needing a
new pool. The city needs a new pool because the old pool has
too many problems. The pool is so old it has been condemned. Without a new pool
our local swim team soon won’t have a place to practice and people in the
neighbourhood won’t have a pool to use. It was a great project because our
great creative plans showed a nice pool that would be safe, big and clean. It was
hard though because the mayor wasn't able to reply to our message. He was interested though and tweeting him was great. I think that the problem with this project is that
building a pool is such a huge project that it will take years to finish.

World Hunger

For our presentation for addressing
an issue we chose world hunger. We decided to have a bake sale to
raise money to give to a company that helps people all over the world not just
in Canada. After a while of searching for a company we found a company called The Global Food Banking Network.
This company was just what we were looking for.Once we figured that out, we planned a date to have the bake sale. At first we thought we should do it on Sunday, but my mom thought that we should have it at school because who wants to sit outside in the cold and barely make $30 dollars! So we had the bake sale on November 18th. We thought the bake sale was going so well that we decided to have it the next day as well (the 19th). And that was a good idea because we got even more sales than the first day! Overall we got a total of $75 dollars! After we got all the money we mailed it to The Global Food Banking Network. Now more people can have food.How can
you help? You can help by learning more about poverty and donating money to The Global Food Banking Network.
To learn more visit: http://www.foodbanking.org/

Thanks
for taking the time to listen and consider donating!

Leatherback Turtle

Our issue is that the
leatherback sea turtle is critically endangered which means it is very close to
becoming extinct and only 1% of baby Leatherbacks will grow to be an adult due
to the many threats that they have to face.

Although the Leatherback is
almost extinct there are a lot of organizations trying to save and get the public aware
of the Leatherback Turtle such as, Government agencies, Marine Conservation
Associations, the WWF (World Wide life Fund) and even some fishing companies
have installed TED Turtle Exclusion Devices, so turtles can
escape if they were to get caught in the net.

We chose this topic because we are interested
in learning about the Leatherback turtle and how we can help to make sure this
amazing creature doesn’t go extinct. We created a PowerPoint presentation and
presented to the class to try to get more people aware of this amazing creature
and what they can to do help to help the Leatherback. We think that we
accomplished our goal of getting the public aware of the turtle and now a lot
more people know of it and what they can do to help.

The picture that we have chosen is of a
jellyfish (since the chances of finding and getting a picture of a Leatherback
Turtle are very rare). The jellyfish is the Leatherback’s main source of food
as it can eat its weight in a day. This picture was taken at the Vancouver
Aquarium.

We found PBL interesting and a new good way
to Learn. We think that PBL (project based learning) should be taught more
around other schools as it is a very engaging and fun way to learn!!!

(Before and After)

How did we feel about this addressing an issue project. We thought this project was very interesting because we got to change people’s point of view about the use of electronics. The only down side we found is that we think it would be nicer to not have a due date with this assignment so we could play around, experiment and raise more awareness on our topic. We like project based learning, because we get to work together, and it’s more efficient than learning out of a textbook.

Our addressing an issue project is on how students all around the world are spending too much time in front of an electronic device. We wanted to find out how much time kids in our class spend on a device each day. The results from this survey were 4-5 hours a day. We believe that kid’s imaginations are getting weaker throughout each year because their imaginations are already brought to life for them in a game. We also believe that kids are getting less social because electronics are taking over their free time.

Mr. Robinson allowed us to introduce two days with no electronics in class to our fellow students. Through the two days we found it harder than you would think to not use any electronics. The big question after those two days was if the experiment made a different in our classmate’s weekends, in terms of using electronics. The results we got back were that 7 kids said they had more time on a device, 4 kids said less and 8 kids said they had no difference in time.

---------Thank you for letting my class share their projects with you. It is surprising to see how far students can go with three simple words "Address an Issue" and some leeway. This venture has helped my students strive for real world gains in future projects as well. One poignant comment to note is that several students mentioned that they wish they didn't have a due date. Interesting. Did I have to set a date for their presentations? Could I have simply had them present their ongoing work?

Opening the door to project-based learning has been a turning point in my career. It has been a great foundation as I develop Connections-based Learning. Through it all, I have learned to never underestimate what a student can do.